The Folly of the Activism Culture

We all know what went down at Middlebury College, when foolish students shouted down and assaulted a mainstream libertarian scholar, Charles Murray.

But the vile left-wing thug culture is all around us.

Here is climate activist Peter Gleick, identity thief, according to Wattsupwiththat.com.

Peter Gleick impersonated a member of the Heartland Board of Directors to steal documents, then spiced up the swag with a forgery when he discovered it didn’t contain anything incriminating, all while serving as chair of the American Geophysical Union Taskforce on Scientific Ethics.

What is Gleick up to this week? He is sending out the following message:

I’m Marching to Fight the Alarming War on Science. Join Me

"Marching?" "Fight?" "War?" What planet is this guy living on?

What we have here is the delusional "activism culture" of the left, that started with the Communist Manifesto in 1848. The idea back then was that the proletarians working in the factories of the industrial revolution were condemned to "immiseration" and exploitation unless well-born activists represented them and fought in the streets for their rights.

The idea now is that the climate is going to spiral out of control unless well-born activists fight in the streets to save science from the deniers.

The lefties were wrong then, because the bourgeoisie heard the cries of the workers and did something about it; they gave the workers the vote.

And the lefties are wrong now. The question of climate change is not a question to be fought out by marching and fighting in the streets. It is a question to be worked out in the normal peaceful progressions of politics and elections.

Because that is the whole point of elections and legislatures and courts and political speech. It is that everyone agrees not to go to the streets, but instead resolve and compromise their differences in peaceful debate and in the corridors of power.

But the left has absolutely no intention of allowing anyone else to have a vote, on climate change or on the welfare state, or race or gender or anything else. That is the point of the left's pejoratives: racist, sexist, homophobe. That is the point of shouting down conservative speakers on campus. That is the point of marching to fight the war on science.

The funny thing is that the great lesson of the last two hundred years, the Great Enrichment, is that force is usually not necessary to get useful things done. All the great economic disruptions of the last two hundred years did not need central control and top-down direction to mitigate their effects. People just went to work and worked it out with each other and got past it.

So it is a great irony that, just as humans entered an astonishing period where they found that they could negotiate pretty well everything using market exchange instead of defending their patch of land to the last border warrior, we have the growth of a secular religion that makes politics its god: what we now call leftism, or what I call the "activism culture," and this culture proposes that only by marching and protesting and "marching" and "fighting" can we bend the arc of history towards justice.

I understand why we have the activism culture. The development of the universal exchange economy is a wonder for ordinary men and women, allowing them to wive and thrive without having to enserf themselves to a great lord or a local political big-wig.

This development has not been good for people with an appetite for political power. What? No need for high politics? Just let the market take care of it? Even at the level of religion: just let the religious sects compete in the religion market? You must be kidding! There has to be a need for the modern equivalent of the well-born Prince Hals and Harry Percys to duke it out on the battlefields of intersectionality and science and climate change!

Are we condemned to an escalation of this present enthusiasm for activism? Or will the activism of the 2000s go the way of the activism wave of the 1960s?

You may remember what happened after the riots and demos of the Sixties. What happened is that ordinary people absolutely hated it, and they voted again and again for candidates that promised to put an end to it.

And it seemed, when Bill Clinton ran for president and excoriated Sister Souljah, that the whole thing had been put behind us.

Unfortunately we have a new generation of lefties that did not experience the long humiliation of Nixon followed by Reagan. Hopefully they are in for a couple of decades of Trump followed by über-Trump that will teach their generation a lesson.

But you never know.

We are not in Conservative Kansas Any More

I happened over the weekend to read a piece by Claire Berlinski on Richochet where she bemoaned what had happened to conservatism under Trump.

I’m outraged by Trump and what’s become of conservatism, I’m depressed by all of it and sad that I’ve devoted so much of my life to a political ideology that in the end looks as corrupt to me as socialism.

I get it. I got there at the Republican convention when I wrote: "All I Know is that Gentlemanly Conservatism is Dead."

But I think that Berlinski is wrong to say that conservatism was or is as corrupt as socialism.

What happened is that being nice didn't work. That was symbolized last week when conservative/libertarian scholar Charles Murray, a true gentleman, was shouted down at Middlebury College.

The whole point of Charles Murray is that he has spent his life painstakingly showing that liberalism doesn't work.

Moreover, he argued in The Bell Curve our current education system with its standardized tests and its college entrance by SAT is segregating America into the intelligent and the not-so-intelligent. And in that battle African Americans are going to lose out because they have lower IQs, on average, than whites.

It turned out that you are not allowed to say that in America. Because racism.

So Murray came back with a book about whites, and made the same point. If you are in the top 25 percent, the intelligent ones that get to go to the good colleges and meet and marry people just like them, you are doing fine. If you are the bottom 30 percent, white working class in Fishtown in Philadelphia, you are living in a place where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. And this is a national disaster.

But Charles Murray was not allowed to tell the young heads full of mush about that, not at Middlebury College.

So gentlemanly conservatism has failed; the gentle art of persuasion has failed.

You can understand why. Leaving aside the questions of truth and science and ethics and culture and morality there is the simple fact that any change proposed by conservatives is going to reduce the political and cultural power of liberals. And since political power and cultural power is where liberals live, they are resisting change, any change, to the knife.

That is why we have President Trump. For the last eight years, at least, the Republican base has been complaining about leaders that talk a good line when they want to get elected but that fail to fight when they get to Washington DC. Ted Cruz understood that and designed his campaign to exploit it. But Ted Cruz was no match for Donald Trump in the fighting department. So Donald Trump won the nomination. And won the election.

Donald Trump won the election by winning the key demographic that Republicans have been trying and failing to connect with ever since Ronald Reagan left the White House: the white working class.

The grievance of the white working class is not the same as the Republican base. Their grievance, barely articulated, is that the white working class have been the ones forced to pay for the race quotas and gender quotas of the last 50 years.

But both groups want a president to fight for them, and not make nice with Ted Kennedy or Chuck Schumer or whoever.

That's why we have President Trump. He promised to fight, to Make America Great Again, and make America First.

That is shocking to the Claire Berlinskis of the world, and I am sorry that the world is turning out to be a rougher, tougher place than they had wanted.

So it is shocking to have President Trump go straight down the Democrats' throat on immigration. It is shocking to have President Trump turn the tables on the Democrats' RussiaGate and turn it into a DeepStateGate by accusing the Obama administration of spying on his campaign. No Republican has ever dared to do that, not in my lifetime.

We are just not used to a Republican going for the jugular, and that is because in the past it never turned out well to do so. The Democrats with the help of the mainstream media and its Democratic operatives with bylines could always impose their Narrative over any Republican that dared to challenge them.

The point of the administration of Donald Trump is to find out whether it is possible to turn the tables on the Democrats, the liberal ruling class, the Cathedral and its narrative.

If President Trump succeeds in turning the tables on the liberal ruling class then we are in a new era. If he fails then the liberals have won, and it is single-payer everything and the administrative state to rule over all.

Right now all we can say is that there is hope. It looks like President Trump has the chops and the strategic instinct to play the high-stakes game of challenging the liberal ruling class and its Deep State. But the fight in only in its first round. There is a long way to go, and many perils ahead.

But the old conservatism is dead, and we are not in Kansas any more.

But Can This Anti-Trump Gang Shoot Straight?

I imagine that everyone to the right of Patty Murray is outraged by the continuing campaign to delegitimize and destabilize the Trump administration.

And how are they doing this? With accusations of collusion with the Russians, of all people, to swing the 2016 election. This from Democrats that have spent half a century insisting that the worst political crime in America is to accuse elite Americans of collusion with the Russians. That, you will remember, was what the "Red Scare" and the evils of McCarthyism were all about.

Only, of course, back then, in the 1940s, there really were Communists in the State Department and they really were acting in the interests of the Soviet Union and against the interests of the United States.

So now Attorney General Sessions has recused himself from a Justice Department investigation of Russian influence in the election.

But Mark Levin proposes that President Obama has his fingerprints all over this Russia gambit. And now it appears that his aide Valerie Jarrett will live in the former president's new home and help coordinate his activities against Trump.

Help! Murder! Conspiracy! This is a conspiracy to drive Donald Trump out of office!

Yes. So it is, without a doubt. But do you know what I think? I think that this whole anti-Trump conspiracy is a mistake of monumental proportions. And it is typical of the strategic blindness of the world's First Community-Organizer-in-Chief and the rest of the ruling class that presides over these United Administrative States.

The fact is that Barack Obama has mucked up just about everything he touched. Instead of getting the economy going in 2009 after the biggest financial crash since 1929 he went ahead with the accumulated agenda of the Democratic Party: a stupid stimulus -- like that would help -- followed by heaping huge costs on the economy with Obamacare and green energy. Not to mention burying the financial industry in red tape with the Dodd-Frank bill. Then the Obama administration foreign policy has been a disaster, making the Middle East into a bomb crater.

Not to mention that the Russians have twirled the Obamis around like a Russian doll. No wonder the Obama people are angry with the Russians.

But do you think that the tag team of Obama and Jarrett are going to turn the Trump administration upside down? And Nancy Pelosi? And Chuck Schumer? With their track record? With their level of smarts?

I come back, again and again, to Charles Murray and Coming Apart. It's the final version of a story he has been telling for 30 years. In today's America the top 25 percent, the professional class, is doing well, with great careers, merger marriages, and splendid prosperity. The middle half is not doing so good, with stagnant wages and too much divorce. The bottom 30 percent is in trouble: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. And that is just white people.

The reason we have President Trump is that, for 30 years, our liberal ruling class has been resolutely ignoring this gathering storm, by focusing on identity politics and regulation and green energy.

President Trump won by romancing the white working class, the primary loser from 50 years of race and gender quotas. Now he is busy romancing the blacks, cruelly betrayed by Democratic race politics. Imagine what happens if Trump increases his black vote from 10 percent to 20 percent.

Meanwhile the geniuses in the Democratic Party are shocked, shocked, that Republicans have been talking to Russians. Why, the noive! Didn't we all agree 50 years ago that only Democrats were allowed to do that? Only John Kerry is allowed to talk to the North Vietnamese in Paris. Only Ted Kennedy is allowed to talk to the Soviets about hurting Reagan in the 1984 election. Only Obama is allowed to talk to the Russians about being more flexible after the 2012 elections. Republicans need not apply.

More and more I am coming around to the idea that the Democrats are running out of rope on the identity politics and elite save-the-planet agenda that has obsessed them for the last half century. And the reason is that their politics has done nothing for the ordinary middle-class American.

They are reduced to the status of Scarlett O'Hara. Where will they go? What will they do?

Nothing new here. That is always what happens to ruling classes. They build a world view that turns a mirror on themselves as the noblest, wisest, most evolved people in history. Mirror Mirror on the wall.

All is well until the mirror cracks from side to side.

Joint Address Activism: First Time as Tragedy...

Now that I have got home from emptying out the apartment of Lady Marjorie's mother, I have had time to watch President Trump's first address to Congress.

I know that everyone says it was a smash hit. I thought that it was a learning experience. The president started out a bit hesitant, and tied to his TelePrompters. But pretty soon he got in his stride and starting making political points. It was good because it was not what a State of the Union speech usually is: it was not a laundry list. By the middle of the speech, Donald Trump was in his stride. By the end, he had become a master, doing the Navy SEAL widow piece to perfection.

It was good also because President Trump made full use of the biggest asset of the presidential bully pulpit. The President of the United States is the symbol of the nation, and the sole representative of the American people as a whole. When the president speaks, the American people speak through him. When he calls for unity, for Republicans and Democrats in Congress to get together, he is making a veiled threat: what, you oppose me, the representative of the American people? How could you?

But my big takeaway from the speech was the utter stupidity of the Democrats and their white dresses and their stupid buttons.

I was trying to cudgel my brain to come up with a way of showing the folly of this to you, my readers, and the first thing I came up with was "Activism 101," complete with stupid props for a stupid freshman college course in left-wing social activism. But then I realized that it was worse than that. It was social activism dumbed down for elementary school.

"Now students," says the dull liberal teacher, "I want everyone to come to tomorrow's class as an activist!" So of course the girls choose white dresses, and the boys choose stupid campaign buttons.

But when a government teacher is telling students in a government child-custodial facility to pretend to be desperate people excluded from the system, you can tell that Marx's apothegm still applies. Remember?

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

OK. So modern activism started in 1848 with Marx and Engels issuing a manifesto for the excluded workers of the world. They had a point. But it was a tragedy that their ideas led straight to the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China in which 100 million humans died for no good reason, and that billions of humans were excluded from the miracles of the 200-year Great Enrichment from $1-3 income per day to $120 per day.

But it is a lie for activists funded by George Soros to pretend to be the excluded and the wretched of the earth. And it is utter farce for the members of the House of Representatives, clothed in the power and majesty of the Government of the United State and trailing clouds of glory to pretend to be little kindergarteners dressing up for a unit in social activism.

My point is that when well-born youth -- never mind middle-aged national politicians -- get themselves all gussied up to protest oppression and injustice, it is all probably a lie.

The story of the last year is what gives it the lie. While liberals have been filling the national bandwidth with their end-of-era obsessions for gay marriage and bike paths and turning the health care system upside down to assist 20 million Americans without health insurance, it turns out, as the Washington Post admits, that the white working class was quietly dying of despair.

Golly who knew? Where were the activists? Where were the white dresses? Where were the peaceful protests? Where were the elite-educated community activists?

It is time to get out of the Marxist cycle of tragedy and farce, and get down to work. And the road to sanity starts with the admission that, usually, government is not the solution, government is the problem.

And activism and well-born community activists have nothing to do with the case.

Liberals Screw the Pooch on Navy SEAL

Back in the Sixties (which actually happened between 1965 and 1975) the left here in America thought that the old verities were demolished. So they sneered at the middle class, humiliated the military, and scorned the police.

Only one problem: the American people were going in a different direction. First they elected Richard Nixon, who every liberal hated because first, he had defeated lefty Jerry Voorhis for a seat in Congress and second, he had defeated pinko Helen Gahagan Douglas for a seat in the US Senate. (I earned all about this from my liberal boss when I first went to work in America in the fall of 1968.) Then the American people elected Richard Nixon again, and then Ronald Reagan twice.

I don’t know if the American people had a clue what Nixon and Reagan proposed economically. But what they did like was that Nixon and Reagan were unashamed American patriots. They honored the Flag; they honored the men and women in uniform, and they honored those who had fallen in the service of defending the United States from enemies foreign and domestic. Full stop, end of story, period.

It took liberals and Democrats about 20 years to realize that they were never going to elect a president again unless they pretended to care for the military and the police and wear US flag pins and make a fuss for the benefit of the widows and the mothers of the fallen. The Democratic Leadership Council was formed in 1985 to shift the Democratic Party away from the leftward turn it took in the 1960s. And it worked. In 1992 America elected Bill Clinton, who rebuked Sister Souljah and went back to Arkansas to witness the death of convicted murderer Ricky Ray Rector.

You can see that this is nothing but common sense. Governments may not be instituted among men for the purpose of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, but they very definitely are there to protect the people from enemies foreign and domestic. The people that protect us from foreign enemies are called soldiers; the people that protect us from domestic enemies are called policemen.

But there is a problem. Mothers do not really see why their sons should go for a soldier and get killed in battle or by disease. Every instinct of a mother is to protect and preserve the life of those she loves, whatever the cost. That is why we have notions like Gold Star Mothers and why we make such a fuss about The Fallen, why we have Memorial Day and Decoration Day. Governments need to go to a lot of work to persuade women to sacrifice their loved ones to the national cause. The same goes for policemen slain on the streets of the city. The widows and the mothers must be consoled. Full stop, period, end of story.

But our Democratic friends, starting with the election of George W. Bush, have forgotten this elementary lesson. Again. That is because they don’t believe in nation, don’t believe in marriage, and don’t believe in motherhood. They believe instead in creativity, social, cultural, economic, and political. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of life, the universe, and everything, and one reason why Donald Trump was elected president.

It was Ronald Reagan that started recognizing widows and heroes in the gallery during in State of the Union speeches. Every president since has done the same.

It makes complete sense that President Trump would do the same and recognize the widow of a slain Navy SEAL at his Joint Address to Congress last night. And it is natural that all red-blooded Americans in the House chamber would applaud for two minutes. Number One, the nation’s leaders must always insist that every slain soldier or sailor died a hero and did not die in vain. And Number Two, every red-blooded American knows that liberals hate this sort of unrestrained patriotic display.

The lefties Twitterers that whined and complained about the standing ovation for the slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens are fools and knaves. And the Democrats that sat on their hands and refused to applaud President Trump’s applause lines are fools and knaves.

If you are a conservative or a libertarian or an ordinary American, all you can do is shake your head at this folly, this ignorance, this meanness. And then wink to your Trump-voting buddy across the room.

Why is this so? It falls naturally out of my reductive Three Peoples theory. The best thing in the world for People of the Subordinate Self, workers, peasants, and victims, is to learn the ropes of life and of work in the market economy of the city. All the paraphernalia of the welfare state makes that more difficult. The best thing for People of the Responsible Self, the broad middle class, is to go to work, follow the law, and obey the rules, and maybe get a little adventurous, like starting a business. The best thing for the People of the Creative Self, artists and writers and activists, is to practice a little humility and compassion. Very few people have the chops or the courage to sacrifice themselves to a life of creativity where many are called but few are chosen. And those lucky few that are chosen need to have compassion that fail in the battle for creative achievement and for those that just want a quiet life of following the rules.

Our lefty friends make a big deal about bending the arc of history towards justice. But they need to think about how their program is, in fact, the most monstrous injustice, for it views society not as Three Peoples but as two peoples, where We are the community organizers and the communities of victims that we have organized and They are the people opposed to bending the arc of history towards our kind of justice.

In the Sixties it turned out that there was a lot more of They than We, and it took Democrats two decades to wake up to that. If they are not careful, they are going to repeat history.

According to Marx, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.

Could the Smash-mouth Trump Era Have Room for Irony?

Despite the awful cruelty of the Trump era, featuring Trump gnawing on the hind legs of the new-born lambs of the mainstream media as they gambol innocently in First Amendment Meadow, and also featuring the entire liberal “community” and its bribed apologists in the Deep State attempting to grab Trump by the neck and scrag him, there still seems to be room in these United States for the delicate flower of irony.

In the first place I was intrigued by a piece on the Hells Angels motorcycle gang by Joe Bob Briggs. One fine day the Hells Angels showed up to award Briggs a gold-plated ball-peen hammer. But they couldn't just give it to him nice and sweetly. They had to demand that he show up on stage immediately to receive the award or they would know the reason why.

Briggs runs down the key attributes of a successful gang. The key to being a proper motorcycle gang is to have the reputation of being the roughest, toughest hombres west of the Pecos.

Motorcycle gangs are superpatriotic, writes Briggs; they defend their brothers in a fight, as “Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said to the president of Mexico last week.” They always have an enforcer, and so on.

Hmm. I wonder what Joe Bob Briggs is really talking about?

Then there is Victor Davis Hanson writing about “The Metaphysics of Trump.” How could a bad man select such good appointees, and how could they work for such a bad man? And if it is OK for these people to work for Trump then how come “nearly the entire diplomatic and security establishment in Washington refuses to work for such a reprobate?”

I am reminded of my departed mother, who recalled all her life being taught that King Charles I of England was a good man and a bad king, and Charles II was a bad man and a good king. In the end, of course, it didn't matter, not after Prince William of Orange invaded Britland with a 500-ship fleet and turned the Stuarts out of office.

And then we come to the Republican establishment with its globalist agenda of tax cuts and free trade agreements, but could never see around the corner to say “we love our miners, farmers, vets.”

Now that Trump has done it, it all seems so easy.

Golly, who would be dumb enough to figure that he could win a presidential election by making people feel that “he cares about people like me?” Or outfox the Democratic presidential candidate and her twentysomething whiz kids by executing on a sucessful Electoral College strategy to win the election decisively even though he lost the popular vote?

And what Republican has recently made such a bold outreach to African Americans?

I mean who are the dumb ones here? The ruling class Poo-Bahs? The Deep State time-servers? Or the guy with a combover that plays an idiot on TV?

See, I think that the key thing about Donald Trump is that there was a day in his life when he was in a room with 40 bankers trying to persuade them not to liquidate his bankrupt business empire. He managed to persuade them to take a haircut and let him live to rise again.

In my view you need a lot more smarts to hornswoggle a room full of bankers than to persuade Americans to vote for you.

Here is the big question facing the deep thinkers of America in the late winter of 2017. Is President Trump a political genius that figured out, finally, how to bring the white working class out of the wilderness? Or is he the leader of a biker gang that only knows the rules of intimidation?

You make the call.

What's All This About "Fourth Turnings"

Trump adviser Steve Bannon, we are told, is a devotee of a book by William Strauss and Neil Howe called The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy published back in 1997. Now the Washington Post has asked Neil Howe to write about his book.

As Neil Howe writes, his book proposes that society moves in "a recurring cycle of four-generation-long eras." The cycle culminates in "a time of civic and political crisis." The idea of the book was to "reject the deep premise of Western historians that social time is either linear... or chaotic[.]"

The Crisis could, of course, involve war, as in World War II, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. For the current Crisis, Strauss and Howe predicted a "'Great Devaluation' in financial markets" starting in about 2005. In other words, we are back in the 1930s, a decade that was resolved, you may remember, by a big old world war that healed the divisions in America by drafting all the young men from the great immigration wave at the turn of the 20th century into the armed forces.

Strauss and Howe were writing a book, so their cycle theory of history needed fancy names, with four Turnings that amount to a seasonal cycle, starting with the hope of High, followed by Awakenings, Unraveling, and Crisis. But their theory is not much more fanciful than the normal way of politics. A new ruling class gets power, mobilizes the nation in a new vision but, after a decade of two of looking after their supporters and blindly ignoring the fate of others, find that the natives are getting restless. That leads to a crisis, because the ruling class is usually too stupid or too proud to listen to the grievances of the "other," and allows grievances to fester. Anyway, they already spent all the money on their supporters.

My daughter recently alerted me to the work of Peter Turchin. In Ages of Discord he observes that the last time that the US experienced a partisan divide like the present was back in the 1850s. Same thing, different theory.

In the 1850s the issue was slavery. Imagine that the South had been willing to deal on slavery. The deal would have involved some sort of payoff, some sort of compensation to the plantation owners for the loss of their property. In retrospect that would have been a pretty good deal.

Now we have an issue between the idea of the nation-state community and the global elite. The global elite wants to get to the future in double quick time, and the people of the nation states don't want to lose what they have got. You would think there has to be a deal that would satisfy both parties before we get to fighting words.

The immediate question is: what does Steve Bannon want? Is he using the theory of Strauss and Howe to upset the apple cart, to force a crisis? Or is he trying to move President Trump to a deal that preserves the nation-state culture while still admitting the fact of a global economy where there is no place to hide, at least not for long?

Is the Trump era going to solve the Crisis, or is it going to intensify it?

The problem for our liberal friends, I suspect, is that they instinctively realize that the Trump era is not going to be good for liberals. That is why they are all piling up at their therapists.

But how bad could it be? At this stage of the game, all we deplorables want is for liberals to stop insisting on piloting the US solo. We want them to share power, and allow other hands upon the controls.

It is pretty obvious, since November 8, that our liberal friends are terrified by the idea of other hands on the controls. They seem to be preparing to fight to the knife to prevent Donald Trump from messing with their hegemony.

Either way, it seems that the US, and the rest of the West, is approaching a crisis, because something will have to change.

I would like the crisis to be resolved amicably. But I am not sure that we will get so lucky.